Everything okay? Rose mouthed at her, concerned.
Fine, she mouthed back, trying for a smile but falling short, the rigid muscles around her mouth straining with the effort.
Ma stopped moving halfway down the hall, raising his hand in a stalling gesture that brought the rest of them to a halt.
He leaned in towards Karen - the nervous blinking she’d described to El now in overdrive - and whispered something in her ear.
Kerry, El saw him say - the movements of his own mouth and cheeks so exaggerated that she’d have been able to understand him even if she hadn’t been able to lipread. I couldn’t get ahold of her - I don’t know where she is. She could be here any minute.
No, Karen told him. She won’t be. She’s been dealt with.
At that, at least, El smiled.
In all the planning around blackmailing Ma and laying the bait for Carruthers, El had very nearly forgotten about Kerry Lawton - “that little circus girl,” as Hannah persisted in calling her.
Thank God for Harriet, El thought. She might not have been the warmest of hosts, and she might not be all that happy to have El as a prospective sister-in-law… but she’d done a hell of a job.
The club had been heaving when she’d arrived. That was how Harriet had told it, anyway - given the woman’s aversion to human company, El wouldn’t have been surprised to discover that the place had held no-one but Harriet, the bartender, two other drinkers and a cat. Though if there had been a cat, perhaps Harriet would have mentioned it - to RD Laing, if not to her and Rose.
She’d bought herself a glass of orange juice, lit a clove cigarette with a box of matches she’d procured for the occasion - though she didn’t smoke, and El was sure she’d complained to Rose in private before about El’s habit - and taken herself off to the least-dark section of the establishment she could see, where she’d begun to read.
The book she’d bought with her was a novel - a novel about a circus, no less. It had been a strategic choice on Harriet’s part, as had the cigarettes: a way of piquing Lawton’s interest in what threatened to be a crowded marketplace.
“I’m an attractive enough woman,” Harriet had said, investing the statement with no more vanity or boastfulness than she might have a comment on the weather outside, “but we don’t know what she looks for in a partner, do we? And what I have to work with might not be enough to stand out from the pack. So it would serve us well to load the dice, as much as we’re able.”
Someone reading a book in a nightclub would, she’d reasoned, attract at least a little attention - would turn heads her way. Perhaps many of the women who looked would find her pretentious and would immediately look away – and if they did, that was fine. Because if they’d looked, they’d also have seen the book’s cover: a vivid, Fauvist depiction of a female acrobat suspended in mid-air, her ankle wrapped around a trapeze.
“And the cigarettes?” Rose had asked. “Do cloves have some sort of… aphrodisiac property?”
“None that I’m aware of,” Harriet had replied. “But if I’ve learned anything from those old detective films you two keep insisting I sit through, it’s that no femme fatale worth her salt goes anywhere without a cigarette in her hand. And the flavoured ones are the only kind I can stomach.”
Lawton had entered the club around 9pm. Harriet would, she said later, have guessed from the first look that the girl had been a performer - a dancer or a gymnast, if not an acrobat - even if she hadn’t been briefed on her background. There was an unusual fluidity to her, a precision; the weaving of her tall, thin body in and out of the gathering crowds around the bar and tables seeming designed not to navigate the space so much as to cut through it with an invisible scalpel.
She’d been casually dressed, her clothes barely more elaborate than Harriet’s: jeans, a fitted black t-shirt, long blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail. But it had been clear, from the darting of her eyes and the aura of restlessness that surrounded her as she walked the club, gaze briefly stopping to rake up and down the other bodies she saw there, that she’d been on the prowl.
It had taken her a few minutes to spot Harriet - still sipping at her orange juice and smoking her sickly-sweet cigarettes and leafing through her paperback. But once she’d seen her, and seen the book, she’d been sufficiently intrigued - as Harriet had predicted - to walk over to Harriet’s table and sit down on the low banquette beside her.
“Good book?” she’d asked, her voice deep and gravelly and recognisably American - Western American English, as Harriet had mentally classified it.
“Not bad,” Harriet had answered, not looking up at her. “I’m not sure the writer knows a lot about trapeze work, though. She keeps mixing up the catch trap and the fly bar.”
“You know a lot about trapeze?”
Lawton had sounded amused, Harriet thought - tickled at the prospect of the unlikely-looking Englishwoman in front of her having any kind of familiarity with the acrobatic lexicon. But curious, too. Interested.
“A little,” Harriet had told her, lying through her teeth. “I was Treasurer of my uni’s Circus Society as an undergrad. Most of it was spinning and juggling - torch and poi and diabolo, that sort of thing. The occasional bit of unicycling. But I got rather into the aerial work, when we were able to do it. Hence, you know… this.”
She’d closed the book and held it up in one hand, so that Lawton could take a closer look. Lawton had ignored it, fixing her eyes instead on Harriet - weighing her up, taking stock (or so it had seemed to Harriet) of her value.
“You still practice?” she’d said eventually.
“No. I’d love to, but there never seems to be time. I’ve thought about private lessons, though. It’d be great to get back into… I was going to say the swing of it, but…”
She’d let her own eyes fall back to the book, ostensibly embarrassed by the inadvertent pun.
Lawton had smiled, slow and lazy.
“You know,” she’d offered, pitch dropping to a drawl, “I know a little about aerial myself. Maybe I could show you sometime. If you want.”
“I don’t live far,” Harriet had told her, following Lawton out of the club and onto the Albert Embankment. “It’s Southwark - just across the bridge.”
“Sounds good to me,” Lawton had told her, linking her fingers in Harriet’s.
Harriet had done her best, as she’d assured Rose and El later, not to flinch at the contact.
It had taken them no more than a few minutes to reach the flat: a suitably anonymous third-floor two-bed on Lavington Street that Harriet had rented for a night from a property company specialising in furnished homes-from-home for affluent commuters.
She’d led Lawton through the lobby, into the lift and - after several excruciating seconds in which she’d been convinced Lawton might try to pull her closer or, God forbid, kiss her - into the flat itself.
“Bedroom’s down here,” she’d told Lawton, gesturing to a closed door at the bottom of the hallway. “Go on through - I won’t be a moment.”
Lawton had nodded, walked the few steps to the end of the hall and, not bothering to turn on the light switch, stepped through into the bedroom.
Where she’d found Sita, sitting perfectly still on the edge of the bed.
Chapter 26
West Hampstead, London, April 1998
“There’s something terribly familiar about that girl,” Sita said, examining the print-out copy of Lawton’s passport that Karen had given them, in amongst the dozen other documents representing what information she’d managed to gather so far on Madera’s associates. “I do wish I could put my finger on it. Remind me, darling - where did you say she was from?”
“Nevada, funnily enough,” Karen replied. “Not the casino bit - unless you count the whole state as the casino bit, which maybe you should, I don’t know. A place called Boulder City. Little town in the mountains, about twenty-odd miles outside of Vegas. I thought at first she’d just moved there, to be closer to the circus stuff, but no - turns out she’s ac
tually from there. Born and bred.”
Sita squinted at the print-out, nose wrinkling in puzzled concentration.
“Reckon you know her from somewhere?” Ruby asked.
“I don’t see how I could. I haven’t been to Nevada in years - not since that debacle with the Randazzos and the canary diamonds, if you recall. She wouldn’t have been more than a child, then.”
“You sure?” El said. Sita had a hell of a memory for names and faces; it was one of the things - when used in conjunction with the charismatic affability that led so many of the people she met to persuade themselves they’d fallen a little in love with her - that made her so formidable on the job. If she thought she recognised someone, then the odds were good, in El’s opinion, that she’d met that someone before, somewhere along the line.
“No.” Sita looked again at the image on the page; studied it. “Not at all, in fact. It’s that mouth, you know - that mouth, and those eyes. And the cheekbones. Honestly, if she were even a few years older, I’d almost have said…”
She stopped, mid-sentence.
“What?” said Ruby.
“Nothing,” Sita told her, shaking her head. “Nothing.”
“Pull the bleedin’ other one. I know that look.”
Sita looked up from the print-out, momentarily defiant - then, her defiance wilting in the heat of Ruby’s glare, shrugged.
“I can’t be certain. I’m not certain. But I believe - I believe I’d like to make a phone call. To John Hertzberg, among others.”
“Hertzberg? Weren’t he that mob lawyer, the one you took up with in Reno?”
At this, Sita threw Ruby a glare: one that El, fluent by now in the subtextual communication that flowed as ceaselessly between the two old women as psychic energy along a ley line, interpreted as we will talk about this later.
“Fine.” Ruby threw her hands in the air, exasperated but apparently prepared to wait until the others had left for her answer. “Have it your way. Go and ring him. But for Christ’s sake, don’t go telling him where we’re living these days. I ain’t in the mood to have another one of your suitors swearin’ undying love for you from behind the bushes like Cyrano de bloody Bergerac.”
Chapter 27
Southwark, London, May 1998
“This your idea of a set-up?” said Lawton, taking in Sita’s silhouetted form on the bed. “Your friend Redfearn gonna pop out of the closet and shout surprise!?”
“No,” Sita replied evenly. “Just me. Would you like to take a seat, Kerry? You may not be able to see it very clearly in this light, but I believe there’s a chair in the corner by the desk.”
Lawton didn’t move.
“Guess you know who I am, then. Okay. Well… fair’s fair, right? I mean, I’ve heard a lot about you and your friends, these last couple months.”
“You won’t sit down?”
“No.” Lawton shifted position; withdrew something small and dark from the inside of her jacket and redistributed her weight, almost imperceptibly, onto the balls of her feet. “No, I think I’ll stay where I am, if you don’t mind.”
“I’m an old woman, Kerry. I have arthritis and high blood pressure and bones that complain when I stand up too quickly. I assure you, I couldn’t do a girl like you the least bit of physical harm, even if I wanted to. There’s no sense at all in you attacking me.”
“Who says I want to attack you?”
“There’s a knife in your hand - a combat knife, if I’m not mistaken. What do they call it? A Ka-Bar. And I expect you have a few other weapons about you, too. It would certainly make sense to come prepared, in your line of work.”
Lawton’s weight shifted again. The handle of the knife, Sita noticed, remained clasped in her fist, the dark edges of the carbon steel blade catching what little light had filtered into the bedroom through the half-drawn blinds.
“What is it you need, Sita?” she asked. “‘Cause as pleasant as it is making conversation with you… I kinda had a different end to this evening in mind.”
“I know you can’t call them off,” Sita said, suddenly harder, sharper. “Madera and Carruthers - they’re a law unto themselves, I realise that. But I can request that you remove yourself from the situation - that you step away and let them get on with whatever they feel they need to do to us. Which is what I’d like to ask you now - to go. Get out of London. Tomorrow, ideally, if not sooner.”
Lawton very nearly choked on her laughter.
“That’s your solution to your problem? Requesting I go away and leave you alone?”
“It’s one solution. I also have a second.”
“Which is what?”
“Calling Madera myself to let her know who you are, and why you’ve been working for her.”
“Oh, this is good! Go on, then - tell me, I’m dying to know. Who am I?”
“Santino Randazzo’s daughter. His daughter who, unless I’m very much mistaken, has been for quite some time now passing him the more salient details of Madera’s targets. And of how he might capitalise on their passing.”
Lawton moved quickly; preternaturally quickly. But still, the words were out of Sita’s mouth before the girl could bridge the distance between them with the knife.
“Kill me tonight, and Madera will find out.”
Lawton stopped dead, a foot away from Sita’s body on the bed.
Sita stood, looking neither old nor frail but every bit as fearsome, in her way, as Lawton had as she’d pulled the knife.
“As you’ve said, Kerry - I have friends. Several of those friends know exactly where I am currently. They know why I happen to have found myself here. And they know, moreover, who you are. Should any harm come to me, any harm at all… any one of them would be willing to make that phone call to Madera. And it may be that I’m underestimating her capacity for forgiveness, but it occurs to me that she might be disinclined to offer you the sort of head start I just have before she acts on the information received.”
A pleased but faintly flummoxed look had settled over Sita’s face when she finally returned to the living room after making her phone calls to Nevada, that afternoon in Ruby’s living room.
“Found out what you wanted, did you?” Ruby asked her, the curiosity emanating from her in waves.
“You could say that, yes,” Sita said, sidling past El and Rose and collapsing into the most overstuffed of Ruby’s armchairs.
“And? Spit it out, for God’s sake. We’ve been on bleedin’ tenterhooks in here.”
Sita took a cigarette from her little gold case, lit it and inhaled, the resultant smoke exiting her nostrils in a rapid succession of thin, translucent quills.
“It’s a rather peculiar thing, isn’t it, serendipity?” she began. “One can believe oneself down to one’s very final chip, and then the croupier spins the wheel just so, and suddenly one finds oneself a hundred thousand in the black. Quite remarkable, really.”
“What the hell are you on about, woman? You’re not making no sense.”
The cigarette returned to Sita’s lips, and she took another, longer drag.
“I believe,” she said, “that I may have, quite inadvertently, stumbled upon a solution to at least one of our problems.”
“And that is?” Rose prompted her, her own patience for Sita’s performance - or so El thought - wearing thin.
“John Hertzberg - the man I spoke to just now. As Auntie Ruby mentioned: he’s a lawyer. And the majority of his clients are… not altogether what you’d call upstanding citizens.”
“Bleedin’ mafia, is what she means,” Ruby added. “Dons and capos and consiglieri and what have you. Syndicates. Crime families.”
“That’s one way to characterise them, certainly.”
“So Lawton’s… something to do with the mafia?” El asked.
“In a way, darling. It seems she may be the daughter of… oh, what would you call it? An underboss. The second-in-command of a crime family. And not just any crime family, at that - the biggest in Las Vegas.”
<
br /> Matteo Randazzo, she explained - though Ruby had evidently known already - was the godfather of the Randazzo family: an enormously powerful and vastly influential criminal organisation that controlled, through means both direct and insidious, the majority of business conducted in the Las Vegas Valley area. A self-taught polymath passionate about medieval philosophy and Modernist literature, he was, at least in Sita’s estimation, a gentleman, despite the occasional act of retributive violence necessitated by his line of work. Whenever their paths had crossed - the time, for example, when he’d called on her help to retrieve a haul of jewellery stolen from his elderly mother by an unscrupulous travelling salesman - she’d enjoyed his company immensely.
His younger brother Santino, however, she’d found less captivating by far.
“The runt of the litter, he was,” Ruby said. “Touch of the Fredo Corleone about him, if you know what I mean. None too bright, and not much cop at the physical stuff, neither, but always thought he should’ve had more of a slice of the pie than what he got given. Wouldn’t’ve been nowhere, if it weren’t for old Matteo.”
The familial connection had won Santino a place at the table, however ill-deserved, and he’d served as his brother’s second-in-command - though the majority of his days and nights he spent drinking, gambling, ingesting prodigious volumes of cocaine and sexually harassing the young female dancers, escorts and cocktail waitresses who worked the hotels and casinos of The Strip.
“Proper grabby little bastard, Santino,” Ruby added. “Nasty, an’ all. Sort who’d pinch your arse with one hand and slip a Mickey in your drink with the other, then threaten you with the sack or a visit from the Old Bill if you told him where to stick it.”
“An unpleasant man,” said Sita. “Deeply unpleasant. You’d never feel entirely comfortable leaving any of the girls alone with him, even when he was prepared to pay them for an hour or two of their time.”
The Remembrance Page 21